


Locker Room Talk

by showzen



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Unsympathetic Jaylen Hotdogfingers, shes kind of very evil in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/showzen/pseuds/showzen
Summary: The game ends 4-2 to the Wild Wings. Allison corners Jaylen in the locker room after.(or allison abbott is sick of her team being the villains of the league)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	Locker Room Talk

The game ends 4-2 to the Wild Wings. Allison corners Jaylen in the locker room after.

“Hey, Hotdogfingers,” she snarls from across the room. As much restraint as it takes not to storm over to her and just go ham with her nail bat, Allison knows better—approaching Jaylen is like approaching a wild animal, now. Slow, calm movements. Don’t get too close. Don’t turn your back on her.

A quiet, harsh chuckle comes from Jaylen’s corner of the room. “We last-naming now?” She asks her locker. Allison can’t see her face but she can  _ hear  _ the smirk in her voice. She tightens her grip on her bat. “Alright, Abbott. What, am I in trouble or something?”

The other Garages scattered around the room pointedly don’t look at either one of them as the tension between them crackles like feedback. “Hell yeah, you are,” she responds, equally venomous. “What the fuck was that game?”

Jaylen shrugs at her locker. Allison puts two hands on her bat and gets ahead of herself, speaks out of turn. “Look at me, for fuck’s sake.”

She does as asked. When Jaylen turns around and meets Allison’s eyes, her lips are twitching, the emotion in her eyes mischievous and inscrutable. Allison curses herself for losing the upper hand so easily.

“I don’t know what you  _ mean _ ,” she enunciates, as though Allison is stupid, a blithe smile on her face. “I just pitched a hell of a game. What the fuck  _ was  _ that game, you and  _ everyone else? _ ” She casts her callous gaze from left to right across the room. The other hitters continue to intensely study their locker, a bench, or literally anything other than Jaylen.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Allison growls, the only one brave (or reckless) enough to meet her eye. “I don’t care about losing. We’re the fucking Garages, we’re supposed to lose, Gods know I don’t care about losing. I care about the fact that you fucking  _ killed  _ one of the Wings.”

A hush falls over the room. Allison thinks she hears Teddy clear his throat; peacemaker that he tends to be, even he won’t interfere here.

Jaylen doesn’t rise to it. She merely shrugs, again, and says, “No, I didn’t.”

_ “What?” _

“You heard me, Abbott,” she responds, voice dripping with contempt, a smirk slowly growing on her face. “That rogue ump killed him, not me.”

“Oh!” Allison says, in her brightest, most sickly, sarcastic tone. “Okay, in that case, was it the ump that made Malik unstable too, huh?”

She throws out an arm to the side, roughly gesturing at where Malik sits, half-hiding behind Cedric. His tail is still bushed out as thick as a feather duster. A restless, bluish hue twitches around him.

She rests her gaze back on Jaylen. “Was it the ump that put a target on his back? Was it the ump that almost got him killed?”

Cedric gives a little hissing intake of breath at her bluntness, and she sees Malik flinch out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have it in her to be  _ considerate  _ of  _ feelings _ right now. She has to stay focused. Don’t give her any sign of weakness. Maintain control.

Jaylen rolls her eyes and turns back to her locker. Evidently she doesn’t have the same rules about Allison as Allison does about her. “You’re being dramatic. I’m not  _ killing  _ anyone,” she states. “Just making it… let’s say, a more likely fate for them.”

A very quiet complaint mumbles its way out of some Garages at that—Allison appreciates it, makes her feel supported. Of course, they’re silenced as soon as Jaylen’s reddish-whitish eyes sweep the room once more.

“Incineration is part of the job,” Allison says slowly. “but that’s not the same thing as what you’re doing. You’re advocating it. You’re—you’re  _ enjoying  _ it.”

A silent moment passes after she says that. It feels like an hour. The batters dare to start to look up again, their anticipation momentarily outweighing their nerves, as the room sparks with tension. Allison just wishes Jaylen would  _ look _ at her. She needs to have some sort of read on her emotions, rather than having to guess by this still, ominous figure in the corner.

Then Jaylen turns back to her, a winning, presidential smile plastered across her face and her eyes meeting Allison’s with this  _ knowing  _ look, like, like Allison is  _ in on the joke  _ or something.

She hates it.

“Maybe so,” she hums idly, hefting her bag, and strides out of the locker room.

The entire room explodes, heated chatter, gasps and rumours threading from player to player. Allison tries to shout after her, as though that will beckon her back. “We’re meant to  _ mourn  _ with the other teams when players get taken,” she finds herself screaming. “You’re taking that from us. We’re the villains now, and it’s  _ your fault! _ ”

Her calls, of course, fall on deaf ears. Jaylen is long gone, and the rest of the team are too wrapped up in their own conversations to  _ really  _ hear her.

As Allison stands staring in the middle of the room, the others slowly start to finish up and filter out of the locker room. As Malik, still bottlebrush-tailed, grazes past her with Cedric, she catches a little of what he’s saying.

“I miss Mike,” she thinks he says sadly.

“I know, bud,” she thinks she hears Cedric reply, voice tired, as he claps a hand to his friend’s shoulder. “Me too.”

Soon enough, she and Teddy are the last ones remaining in the room. She can feel him hovering a little way off behind her, and maybe she’s irrationally angry just at the moment, but she thinks she might punch him in the face if he doesn’t announce his presence in a minute.

“So,” he starts, voice measured. “Lots of big feelings.”

That’s what does it for Allison. A low grunt of irritation slowly morphs into a roar, and suddenly her locker is the victim of a beating from both fists and nail bat. She gives all her rage out into pummelling its metal door in the hopes that when she talks to Teddy she won’t have any more to spend on him.

When she wrenches her bat free of the door, it’s considerably more dented and considerably more punctured than before. She glares down one particularly large hole, where she thinks the metal that once was there might now be adhered to one of her bat’s nails, and drops the bat.

Teddy sits down on the bench just to the left of her gaze. A bold move, all things considered. Despite it all, she sits down beside him.

“Um, sorry,” she chokes out awkwardly. Apologizing is not Allison Abbott’s strong suit.

“Nah,” He says mildly. “I’m just glad it was the locker and not me.”

She snorts and looks at the ceiling. One of the water stains up there looks kind of like Mike. She remembers the day when Ollie noticed its resemblance to him, and the whole team spent, like, a week joshing him about it. Even up until his departure from the team, they’d occasionally manage to slip in some ribbing about the stain’s lack of chin, or its misshapen eye-marks. Thing about Mike was, he never shot back at them—anyone else on the team, you could expect some fiery comeback for any of the friendly bullying you doled out to them, but not Mike. He would just give this docile smile and gamely agree with whatever invariably rude thing it was you’d said about him. Her brow creases slightly when she thinks of what they traded him for.

“What are we gonna do, Duende?” She murmurs into the silence. Logically, she knows it should be ‘what are  _ you  _ gonna do, Duende’, since he’s the captain, but realistically, she knows that if he makes a choice she doesn’t agree with, he’s getting a nail bat to the face, so in essence, it’s a  _ we  _ question.

He sighs, long and hard and after a moment, says “I don’t know.”

She grunts approvingly, deciding to shelve the bat-face plan for now. “Yeah, me either.”


End file.
